


Heirloom

by what_alchemy



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-01
Updated: 2011-08-01
Packaged: 2017-10-22 02:13:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/232587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock finds John's grandfather's stethoscope.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heirloom

The stethoscope was an antique, really — John’s grandfather had used it in the Second World War. He had been a medic, and upon returning to the United Kingdom, he became a proper doctor. When John was just a wee thing and his mum brought him and his sister up for visits, he would nose around the cupboards of his grandparents’ little cottage in Kilmarnock trying to find the stethoscope.

“Och, you’re not to go poking about in other people’s things, Johnny,” his grandmother would say with a light slap to his hands when she caught him. But Granddad would lay a big sturdy hand on his head and disappear into the bedroom, only to emerge a moment later, stethoscope coiled in his grip. In John’s own undersized hands, it was big and unwieldy, an octopus flailing every which way, the earpieces too big and too hard for a child’s ears. The rubber smelled off, and if he looked closely, John could see tiny pockmarks along the tubular length of it.

“It’s disintegrating,” Granddad told him once when he caught John inspecting the imperfections. The oil from hands, John knew now. Not enough attention to upkeep over three, four decades and change. Too many visits from a boy who wanted to listen to everything from Harry’s bum to the row of roses Grandma cultivated beside the house. “It’s old, and tired, and it’s done its duty well.” Carefully, Granddad set the earpieces against John’s ears and pressed the chestpiece to his own chest, above his heart. His grandfather’s heartbeat was slow and calm, but also huge, taking up all the space of the cottage with the throbbing echo of it in John’s head. A low double thump, a loud rush like the sound of the tide coming in, a crackle like fire, and John felt like the entire universe was contained in that steady timekeeping. The sound of it, and his own awe, would never grow old, John thought. Granddad arranged the earpieces around John’s neck and curled John’s fingers around the metal chestpiece. “Best to be careful with it, lad.” Granddad’s hands were warm around his face, just for a moment.

By the time John finished at St. Bart’s, Granddad had turned into a gnarled white curl of a man who refused to be pushed in a wheelchair. He’d come down for the ceremony, insisted upon it, in fact. At the end of it, he stood to what passed for his full height — barely to John’s shoulder — and handed John a plain white box. “Been keeping it safe for you,” he said gruffly, and John slid his fingers into the tangle of greying rubber.

—

Of course, it was only a matter of time before Sherlock found it and did something unspeakable with it. If he was being honest, John was surprised it hadn’t happened sooner — it wasn’t exactly hidden, just quite buried. John came home after a day at the surgery to find Sherlock wrapped tightly in his blue satin dressing gown, contorted into some kind of pretzel that allowed him to listen to his own lungs from his back. When he saw John, his expression brightened and he rolled into a sitting position, yanked the earpieces out, and dangled the entire apparatus from his fingers as if presenting it as a trophy.

“RAMC issue, late ’30s, quite a bit of wear,” he said. “Really, John, if you insist on keeping sentimental knickknacks, you would do well to take better care of them.”

John sighed, locked the door against Mrs. Hudson, and in two strides he was in front of Sherlock with his hand outstretched. Sherlock relinquished it, and its clumsy weight, its stale rubber scent, inspired familiar sparks along John’s memory. His grandmother baking bread, the pale yellow linoleum of the kitchen, the sun on his face in the garden. He rubbed a thumb over the engraving on the back of the chestpiece.

“I have a brand new one you can play with, if that’s what you want,” he said, but Sherlock wasn’t listening — he was undoing the knot in the belt of his gown and letting the fabric slip off his shoulders just so. He was naked underneath, and half hard already, rosy glans just barely pushing past his foreskin. He blinked up at John expectantly even as he lay back and opened his arms wide, not in welcome but as if he were a sacrifice.

“And if I’d wanted that, I would have texted you.” He jerked his chin at the stethoscope in John’s hand. John swallowed and knelt beside the sofa. The earpieces were as hard as they’d ever been — no such thing as silicone comforts in his grandfather’s day —and his ears would ache for hours after wearing them, but all his blood was on fire and seemed to be gathering at the base of his spine. He skimmed a hand from Sherlock’s collarbone to the thicket of hair above his rising cock, the light musculature of Sherlock’s chest and abdomen heating to his palm. John placed the chestpiece of the stethoscope to Sherlock’s left pectoral.

“A miracle thwarted,” John murmured.

“What’s that?”

“I’m fairly certain my grandfather would die of mortification immediately were he to come back to life and discover how I was putting this to use.” Sherlock’s heart rate was slightly elevated, a rapid patter that consumed everything else in John’s world. Just like the rest of Sherlock. John fancied that Sherlock had never been more thoroughly himself until this moment, until his heartbeat subsumed John altogether. “Or whack me bloody for it,” he added, his hardening prick pressed against the sofa.

“You derive sexual gratification from what you consider improper use of your grandfather’s wartime keepsake,” Sherlock said. He was unsuccessful at keeping the breathlessness from suffusing his voice, and he arched into the metal where John moved it downward. “How - ah! - pedestrian.” He twisted and squirmed under John’s professional hand. Normally, if John was being miserly with his touch — and he often was, just to annoy Sherlock — Sherlock would simply drag John’s hands to wherever he wanted them most and press them against his skin. He was demanding like that, utterly selfish and wanton and unselfconscious and it set John’s blood rushing, set his cock hard enough to cut diamonds — or please Sherlock. But today was, apparently, an experiment, and Sherlock’s fine-boned aristocrat’s hands stayed limp and open, flung out like a martyr over the edges of the sofa. His heartbeat thudded in John’s ear, picked up speed.

“Yes, yes, I’m so boringly vanilla,” John said. “The great Sherlock Holmes has much more worldly kinks.” In answer was only a strangled hum.

John slid the stethoscope down the fine line of downy hair that followed from chest to navel, which John had always though of as particularly sweet, proof that Sherlock had been a baby connected to his mother and had not, in fact, sprouted fully grown from the head of some mad scientist in a lab, deductions like insults falling from his lips. From Sherlock’s stomach came the usual bubbling gurgles native to healthy guts the world over. Perfectly ordinary, the core of him. But John knew better. He leaned over and pushed his face into the soft flesh of Sherlock’s belly to inhale deeply. John could get drunk on this scent, addicted, obsessed. Lucky for him, Sherlock was obliging in allowing access to his person for this particular indulgence.

At the edge of his jaw, John felt the moist touch of Sherlock’s fully engorged cock. John flicked his eyes up to see Sherlock, flushed along his cheeks, wet, swollen mouth open around the panting breaths, and his eyes, green now and a touch dazed, meeting John’s gaze.

“Doctor, I’m absolutely at my wit’s end about this priapism,” Sherlock said in a voice not his own, half an octave higher and a good deal more vacant. “Won’t you help me?”

John choked down a laugh. “Prat,” he said. He took mercy though, on Sherlock, on himself, and he grabbed Sherlock by the hips to swing him round to a sitting — or whatever, slouching — position, legs on either side of John’s body, before sealing his lips over the head of Sherlock’s eager prick. With one hand he pumped the shaft into his mouth, and with the other he sneaked the chestpiece low and pressed it behind Sherlock’s balls and into his perineum, where his heartbeat was rabbit-quick and only a touch muffled. Sherlock’s whole body tightened up, his hands fluttered to John’s head and he gave a choked off non-shout — a characteristic vocalisation of his, and if John were in the deducing business, he’d attribute it to formative years spent hiding a good wank from other boys in a shared room at school. But John wasn’t in the deducing business; he was currently in the cocksucking business, and the doctoring business, and the arse over tit for a madman business, and he set himself the task of forcing that thoroughly endearing sound from Sherlock’s throat again and again while the varied noises of Sherlock’s insides washed over him.

Eventually the spindly fingers that tangled themselves in the short hair at John’s neck became more insistent at tugging John away.

“Don’t want to come til you’re in me,” Sherlock said, and he gave a hard yank at the earpieces until they lay inert around John’s neck. John let out a low, rough groan as Sherlock slid off the sofa and turned around, presenting his lean white arse to John’s view, dressing gown bunched up around his waist, the very picture of debauchery. John stripped without care to finesse before he cupped each cheek in a hand and spread them. Sherlock moaned into the cushions and pushed back into the contact. John couldn’t resist laving his tongue over Sherlock’s hole; a solid tongue up the arse always produced an undignified keening that John vowed he’d never tell Sherlock about, lest he start censoring that too. John flickered the tip of his tongue around the rim of Sherlock’s anus over and over, alternated that with shallow dips inside and long strokes up the length of his crack until Sherlock was grinding back into him, hand in hair forcing John deeper, and then, finally— “Good God, John, that’s quite enough! Get on with it!”

John huffed a laugh into Sherlock’s perineum and let go of his own cock long enough to stick a hand up around Sherlock’s head, fingers waggling. Sherlock grumbled and dug around between the cushions until he slapped a half-used tube of lubricant into John’s open palm.

“There’s a good boy,” John said, and Sherlock rocked his arse back against John’s body. John pushed the dressing gown up and kissed up each buttock, the hollow just under his tailbone, the sweat at the small of his back. “Perfect. Gorgeous.” John’s middle and ring fingers slid into Sherlock’s body with minimum exertion, and Sherlock constricted beautifully around them, pushed back into them with a quiet groan, a plea that may have been John’s name. John twisted his fingers gently and then crooked them less gently, and Sherlock sent his head into the cushions with a thwarted cry.

John thrust inside with a single roll of his hips and then paused, trying not to be utterly devastated at the tight heat gripping his cock. Sherlock gasped sharply before driving himself backwards and establishing a rhythm that suited them both. John ran his hands up the long line of Sherlock’s narrow back, leaned down to press kisses into each tiny freckle and mole. He was mapping them, and someday he’d have names for each constellation.

Beneath him, impaled on him, Sherlock was breathing heavily, jerking himself, and generally making as little noise as he could manage. John frowned, watching the stethoscope swing pendulous between them, chestpiece skipping along the knobs of Sherlock’s spine. He put the earpieces back into his ears and pressed the chestpiece between Sherlock’s sharp, gorgeously flexing shoulder blades, and 221b exploded into a riot of sound — the most intimate Sherlock-sounds John could ever hope to hear.

Hummingbird heart, thunderous and joyful. Strong, healthy lungs, free of smoke, of wheezes. Sherlock’s body made cacophonous, discordant, glorious music that whited out John’s vision, dulled every other sense. Proof of life, proof of passion, proof of what heights John could drive Sherlock to. This was no diminishing, this was no reversion to base instinct, no animal rutting. This was John, as close to Sherlock as it was possible to be without burrowing inside his ribcage and taking up residence. This was Sherlock in his purest form. John’s balls began to tighten.

A hollow, echoing reverberation came from deep inside Sherlock and he seized up around John’s prick, shuddering out a hard, spiraling orgasm that John would have to scrub from the sofa, but in the meantime he held Sherlock through it, savored the sounds his body couldn’t help but betray, mouthed around his throat, his ears. Murmured nonsense, declarations, promises. In return Sherlock went limp, eyes closed and mouth tilted upwards, and he said, “Better come in me, John.”

The stethoscope made him feel the vibrations of Sherlock’s deep voice low in his heart, in his balls. It felt like Sherlock had branded the words into the very fabric of his character — who was he to disobey?

—

Afterwards, they moved to the upstairs bedroom — Sherlock’s old room having been converted into a haphazard storage closet whose organisational system only he understood — and Sherlock set about inspecting John with his grandfather’s stethoscope. John lay on his back quietly as Sherlock moved the chestpiece over his body. Behind his ear, at the pulse point in his neck, in both rather rank armpits, at his clavicle, on his gunshot wound, over his heart for several minutes. In his elbow, at his wrist, on each callused fingertip. Down his ribcage, at his diaphragm, on either side of his bellybutton, in the cradle of his pelvis where his pubic hair was lush and also rather rank with lube, sweat, semen. In the crease where thigh met body at the femoral artery, at the base of his spent penis, along the seam of his loose scrotum, at his humid anus. His thigh, his knee, his calf, his ankle until finally, Sherlock was listening intently to the sole of his left foot, looking for all the world like that rough bit of flesh might tell him all the secrets of the universe.

In the purpling dark of the room they shared, Sherlock, spine curving as he bent at John’s side, looked just like moonlight. A dream from a fairy story, something ethereal that might slip away if John breathed too hard. Sex always made him sleepy and a little fanciful — a year into this endeavor John privately called a monogamous and permanent relationship, he was painfully aware of Sherlock’s myriad flaws. But when he touched John with such careful, awed worship, like he was committing him to memory, like being allowed the privilege was some kind of marvel, John could think of none of them. He could only catalogue the quality of his chest’s constriction, the stubborn flop of inky hair into Sherlock’s eyes, the big, long-fingered hands that traced his skin with so much reverence.

“I love you, you know,” John said. His voice came out rough and deep.

Sherlock put John’s foot down and tugged the earpieces from his ears. “He was your maternal grandfather, and he was Scottish, and your parents remembered him in your middle name.”

John had no need to ask — the evidence was plain in the engraving on the back of the stethoscope’s chestpiece: HDN. He wasn’t convinced, though, of Sherlock’s insistence that he always deduced, never intuited. H, after all, could be Horace or Herbert or even Harold, considering John’s sister’s name, and even if it _were_ Hamish, which of course it was, there was no guarantee of a Scots origin. It was merely _likely_ that John was named after his grandfather ( _unimaginative conservative parents,_ Sherlock would sneer, _mired in meaningless tradition_ ), and _likely_ that that particular name should belong to a Scotsman ( _provincial names stood for patriotism and pride, especially among that generation,_ Sherlock would tell him). He’d had the intuition argument with Sherlock just once before, and that had been enough. It had ended in a day-long strop involving sour, piercing notes from the violin, and now John was too sated and pumped full of lovely endorphins to spoil it all trying to get Sherlock to sacrifice a bit of pride. He just hummed his agreement.

“He was the reason you became a doctor,” Sherlock continued. “And the reason you joined the RAMC. He was the only one in your family who approved, told you he was proud. You valued that.”

Occasionally, Sherlock was wrong. But he always declared his deductions as if they were the gospel truth, so it sounded plausible enough to John even though he knew better. The truth of it was that since Harry’d come out, there had been no more visits north of the border, nor Christmas cards, nor phone calls, and just before Her Royal Majesty’s army regiments marched into combat alongside the Americans, the Watsons got word that Hamish Newton had died in his sleep. John’s mum, pinch-faced and white-lipped, took the train up for the funeral. Harry spat on the ground, said “good riddance,” and drank until John had to call an ambulance. John signed up and shipped out, and he did not lay hands on his grandfather’s stethoscope again until he returned to London angry and in pain, gun like a security blanket beneath his pillow. When he unearthed the box he’d got a lifetime ago, he found it free of bitter ghosts, and he felt only a dull ache at the memory of listening to the labour of Granddad’s pipe-damaged lungs.

Sherlock was peering at him with clear silvery eyes, awaiting confirmation of his deduction. Hoping, John knew, for a warm bit of praise.

Then, John decided that if Sherlock said it, it might as well be the truth. He might as well rewrite his own history to be a happier one, one that matched the vision his lover had of him. So he didn’t correct Sherlock his erroneous assumptions, his fallible intuition. Instead, he passed a hand over silken black hair, cast the stethoscope aside, rubbed a thumb over the bridge of Sherlock’s nose, and called him brilliant.

It was the truth, after all.


End file.
